The Peripheral Read Online Free Page A

without changing focus. This one was wearing a quilted vest with lots of pockets, little shiny tools sticking up in them. She was using something like a dental pick to individually arrange things, too small to see, on top of sushi. Round black eyes in the china face, wider apart than human eyes, but they hadn’t been there before.
    She bent her phone a little more, to give her fingers a rest. Scattering the bugs.
    The whirling beige on the floor vanished, like a light turned off, all except for one poor thing, looking like a starfish, that had to hump itself out of sight on what seemed to be wheels in the tips of its five points. Broken, she guessed.
    A woman entered the room. Brunette, beautiful. Not boy-game hot. Realer. Like Flynne’s favorite AI character in Operation Northwind, the French girl, heroine of the Resistance. Simple dress, like a long t-shirt, a dark gray that went to black where her body touched it, reminding Flynne of the shadows on the window. It migrated down, of its own accord, off her left shoulder entirely, as she walked the length of the table.
    Robot girls stopped what they were doing, raised their heads, all eyeless now, shallow sockets smooth as their cheekbones. The woman walked around the end of the table. Cam bugs surged.
    Heard her fingers on her phone, whipping the copter side to side, up, down, back. “Fuck off,” she told them.
    The woman stood at the window, looking out, left shoulder bare.Then the dress climbed smoothly back, covering her shoulder, neckline rising in a V, then rounding.
    “Fuck off!” Lunging at the bugs.
    Window polarized again, or whatever that was. “Fuck you,” she said to the bugs, though it probably wasn’t their fault.
    Ran a quick perimeter check, in case another window might have opened and she’d miss something. Nothing. Not a single bug, either.
    Back around, the bugs were already bobbing, waiting. She flew through them, making them vanish.
    Tongued the cud of jerky away from her cheek and chewed. Scratched her nose.
    Smelled hand sanitizer.
    Went after the bugs.

8.
    DOUBLE DICKAGE
     
    T he boss patcher, unless he wore some carnival helmet fashioned from keratotic skin, had no neck, the approximate features of a bullfrog, and two penises.
    “Nauseating,” Netherton said, expecting no reply from Rainey.
    Perhaps a little over two meters tall, with disproportionately long arms, the boss had arrived atop a transparent penny farthing, the large wheel’s hollow spokes patterned after the bones of an albatross. He wore a ragged tutu of UV-frayed sheet-plastic flotsam, through whose crumbling frills could be glimpsed what Rainey called his double dickage. The upper and smaller of the two, if in fact it was a penis, was erect, perhaps perpetually, and topped with what looked to be a party hat of rough gray horn. The other, seemingly more conventional, though supersized, depended slackly below.
    “Okay,” Rainey said, “they’re all here.”
    Between the oculi of the twin feeds, Lorenzo was studying Daedra in profile as she faced the five folding steps to the top of the moby’s railing. Head bowed, eyes lowered, she stood as if in prayer or meditation.
    “What’s she doing?” asked Rainey.
    “Visualization.”
    “Of what?”
    “Herself, I’d imagine.”
    “You cost me a bet,” she said, “getting together with her. Someone thought you might. I said you wouldn’t.”
    “It wasn’t for long.”
    “Like being a little bit pregnant.”
    “Briefly pregnant.”
    Daedra raised her chin then, and touched, almost absently, the color-suppressed American flag patch over her right bicep.
    “Money shot,” said Rainey.
    Daedra took the steps, dove smoothly over the railing.
    A third feed irised into place between the other two, this one from below.
    “Micro. We sent in a few yesterday,” said Rainey, as Daedra’s parafoil unfurled, red and white, above the island. “The patchers let us know they knew, but nothing’s eaten any yet.”
    Netherton